Walter Braemer

Walter Braemer (7 January 1883-13 June 1955) was an SS Gruppenfuhrer who was responsible for several massacres in Poland and the Soviet Union during World War II.

Biography
Walter Braemer was born on 7 January 1883 in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, German Empire. He served in the Imperial German Army during World War I, joining the General Staff in 1914 and ending the war as a Captain. He was sent to work for the Ministry of the Reichswehr of the Weimar Republic during the Interwar period, and Braemer retired in 1932 with the rank of Generalmajor. However, he joined the SS in 1935 as a regiment commander (Standartenfuehrer), and he became the 223,910th member of the SS. In 1937, he became the 4,012,329th member of the Nazi Party. On 1 July 1938, he became a Major-General in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany, and he was responsible for creating concentration camps in Poland before and after the invasion of Poland in 1939.

On 5 September 1939, Braemer was appointed the commandant of Bydogoszcz (Bromberg), and he ordered "pacification operations". The Bydogoszcz massacre claimed the lives of over 740 Poles and almost all of the 2,000 Jews of the city, and Braemer persecuted the people of the city for the resistance that they had put up to German occupation. On 19 May 1941, his appointment as commandant of Bydogoszcz came to an end, and he became the military commandant of the Baltics commissariat of Nazi Germany. He ordered the annihilation of the Jewish ghettoes of the Baltics in the autumn of 1941, the first instance of ghetto liquidations during World War II; he had the Smilavichy Ghetto and Koidanovo Ghetto liquidated and had 5,900 Jews murdered in the "Slutsk Affair".

On 20 April 1944, he was removed from command after falling out of grace with the Nazi leadership, and he was captured by the British Army in Lubeck, Germany on 2 May 1945. He was released from prison after just two and a half years in British captivity, and he never faced trial for war crimes. He died in Hamburg in 1955 at the age of 72, dying a free man who was never charged with a crime.